New CD Baby digital distribution agreement - Major changes: 1) now specifically non-exclusive and 2) ringtones. Go buy 10 second clips of my songs for $5, dogs.

Justin Frankel's multi-tracker REAPER is up to v0.91 now and is on my list of things to try out. The samples page has my song Look and Feel Years Younger on there too for you to download and try out.

Acoustic Guitar Pickup - how to convert your acoustic guitar to an acoustic/electric. I really want to do this but fear that I'll destroy my guitar.

KEN FLAGG: Paralysis & Denial - my buddy Ken has a new CD out. He'll apparently be playing with MC Frontalot when he goes through Long Island San Francisco.

Jeff Price, the CEO of spinART and Tunecore, who I met at Canadian Music Week, posted his Tunecore pitch in the comments over here. If you're an indie musician interested in or already doing digital distribution it might be worth your while to check it out. Jeff's busy at SXSW right now but I'll be getting some more info out of him such as what the fees are like for musicians who might want to jump ship from CD Baby to Tunecore. I'll let you know what I find out.

Rolling Stones Rice Krispies Commercial - from 1964. Not a bad song, except that it's about Rice Krispies. [via]

Canadian Music Week (the one day of it I experienced at least) was fun. I went there, they had cancelled my hotel room, I wound up getting upgraded to a deluxe room which was hella swank with the double TVs and lounge area and walk-in closet and so on. I went to the panel and none of the moderators showed up and once we were on I felt I was mildly to relatively obnoxious which I consider a personal victory. I recommended that a woman violate the Alzheimer Society of Canada's copyright, said the word "bullshit", drank a lot of complimentary water and made a suggestive comment about Jeff Price, the CEO of Tunecore.

The panel actually went quite well, our impromptu moderator Jay Moonah did an excellent job especially considering he was only told he was moderating about five minutes before we went on. There was a decent crowd but an hour really wasn't long enough to get into answering everyone's questions about RSS, online radio, file-sharing, podcasting, promoting music online, copyright, remixes, blogs, digital distribution, generating buzz, Myspace and more. I felt we only scratched the surface and could have gone a lot longer but that's conference life I guess.

The main gist of my message whenever I opened my big mouth I think was that new artists need to rely on the internet to spread their music for them, that it takes crowds of people sending your songs around to come even close to competing with what the major labels do with millions of dollars, promotion-wise. I told the story of the recent Toy Story 2 Requiem mashup trailer that's been going around with an Israeli remix of my music on it and how that would never have been possible had I been tight-assed about my music rights and had a "media" section with 30 second clips rather than mp3s and slutty rights.

My fellow panelists were a real interesting and friendly group and it was great to meet them. They were all extremely knowledgeable and from different internet paths, which was fun. There was Jeff Price from spinArt Records and Tunecore (a service I'll be looking into more in the next week as it promises an even better artist cut than CD Baby for digital distribution), Dan Beirne from the mp3 blog Said the Gramaphone, Eric de Fontenay from Musicdish, Joe Gallagher from mvyradio.com and Will Evans from Soul Atomic (whose website doesn't seem to be working right now.)

After the panel I was thinking about going to check out some bands but instead got taken to an adult clown show called Lunacy Cabaret. Various clowns (and clown burlesque) and five dollar Bohemian beers. Very fun. Unfortunately I was too tired after the show to head out to the bar across the street for clown karaoke, which may be a decision I regret for the rest of my life.

Well, I'm off to Toronto for the Blogrolling panel at Canadian Music Week tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how much of CMW I'll actually wind up attending as we're like the second last event. Regardless, I will lay down the bomb knowledge and the dope secrets. I'm getting lots of spam from bands that are showcasing there so I might try to check out some of the more belligerent ones and pretend I'm someone important. "I can tell by the five press releases you've sent me in the past week that you kids got moxy."

If I had my new laptop I'd probably try and blog it or something nerdy like that, but I don't so I'll just drink.

For you Wordpress 2.0 using musicians out there, here's a plugin I wrote today: CC Mixlist. It grabs the latest remixes of an artist off CC Mixter so you can display them on your website. I'm using it now in my remix section to list all the Brad Sucks remixes over there. Maybe somebody will find it useful.

Ziggy Stardust comic - scans of a David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust comic. They should revive the Rock Fantasy line of comics and do indie bands. Everyone can be working day jobs and have no time to fight crime.

I ordered a laptop yesterday. An Inspiron 6000 because it was $450 off the regular price. Now I'm wondering what kind of sound card to get for it. I'm planning to use it for recording and for playing live if I can get over my paranoia of spilling beer on it or it getting stolen or some sound guy stepping on it. If anyone knows anything about that stuff, please let me know.

Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur - John August has a transcript of a great speech about professionals vs. amateurs on the net.

As a follow-up to the logo contest results I've got t-shirts for sale with the winning logo on it in my new Spreadshirt store:

So I did this contest on Worth1000.com for a Brad Sucks logo. The final count was 79 entries, which I think was a great turnout. The user rating is in and you can see that here. But I ultimately get to decide who gets the $100 prize. So first off, here's the winner:

I thought about it for a long while but I wound up going back to this one. I like it because it's simple, clean, evocative and weird. What does it say? Something about falling / hurting yourself / being inept / breaking your neck / warning. Pretty general but I think it's spiritually connected to whatever themes my music might have. People I've shown it to have alternately found it funny or curious, but just about everyone has been intrigued by it, which is what I want.

Also for bonus points: the falling guy was taken from one of my Hawaii photos of a warning sign which also said: "if in doubt, don't go out". I loved that when I saw it. "Welcome to paradise - BEWARE THE MANY DANGERS." Great funny/sad stuff. That probably helps me feel a personal connection to it and less like it's some phony contrived logo.

SECOND AND THIRD PLACE

I also bought two of the other logos for a lower price and they are:

Brad Sucks with the fancy BS logo - I really like the BS logo part of this. The logo style combined with the words "brad sucks" I think is kind of funny but also quirky and interesting. It's probably not one I would use to always represent Brad Sucks because it might be a little too funny, but it has a simple weirdness and irony to it that I liked enough to want to keep.

brad sucks logo design - This is the one a lot of people I know picked as their favorite. It was a little plain to me at first but I warmed up to it as it's nice looking, simple and would be easy to use on things without taking up too much space.

Read on for some more jibba jabba about logo selection:

WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENT

Before I get to giving props to some of the other logos, I should explain some things I didn't know I was biased against. Maybe this'll be helpful info if other musicians out there are thinking about getting logos. If I had to do the contest over again, I'd specify:

- No guitars. While I can and do play guitar, putting a guitar in the logo to me says "BRAD SUCKS IS ALL ABOUT GUITARS" which it's really not. I'd feel like I'm trying to be Van Halen or Steve Vai or something. And even they don't put guitars in their logos (1, 2). Also as a small nitpick: I play left-handed and all the guitars in the logos are right-handed.

- No "suck" puns. Lollipops and lemons and so on are cute but I picture people just thinking I really dig on candy or have an oral fixation. "Hey, I'm Brad and I like to put things in my mouth, what's up."

- No smiley faces. Despite having a smiley-face logo currently in my arsenal, I don't need another one. Nirvana rocked the smiley face and that's hard to compete with.

OTHER NOTABLE ENTRIES

Brad Sucks Copyright Logo - This is a really excellently done logo and it does a great job communicating several things at once. My problem with it is the message it sends. It clearly says "Brad Sucks is a one man band who plays guitar (maybe really awesomely since it's in his logo) and doesn't care for copyright" which, while true (except for the awesome guitar part), is kind of a vanilla message and doesn't communicate much about the actual themes or character of my music. It would probably get me more nerd cred though.

Brain Fix - At first I didn't know what this one was supposed to be and then I read the description and I was all "awesome!" and grew to love the little brain icon. The only problem was that most people I showed it to didn't recognize it as a brain (often even after I told them what it was) so I had to count it out. I wanted to love this one though.

Napster Logo - This one's pretty cool and well done, but it looks a lot like the Napster logo. Despite it being ironic, I'd feel like I was advertising for Napster -- which would be extra awkward as I turned down advertising for Napster on here recently. And it's got a bit of a suck pun in there with the tongue out and all. Maybe more of a lick, but still in the mouth area.

There were lots of other great entries as well, but those were the three that stood out the most. CONCLUSION

I'm definitely glad I ran this contest. It was fun to do and as an unintended side-benefit it got a whole bunch more people into my music. I feel like I got my money's worth out of it and I'd recommend it to other musicians on a tight budget. I think you'd have better success if you gave examples of the sorts of band logos you like, rather than leaving it wide-open like I did. I don't think I was as clear as I could have been in my contest description. So that's something I'd pay extra attention to.

I'm way, way, hopelessly, way behind on posting remixes. I've been in denial about it as they've stacked up, but I think I have to admit that I'm so far behind I may never be caught up again. I still love getting the remixes -- but it takes a lot of time to process them and I'm short on the time lately. CC Mixter and I'll make listing those here a priority. Sorry to all the remixers who sent stuff in that hasn't been posted. Anyway, I just thought I'd come clean.

Update: Remix posts to CC Mixter should automatically show up in the remix section (way down at the bottom) now. Still tidying that up, but it seems to work.

The gig on Saturday night went all right, the roads were snowy as hell and not too many people were there, but it was a nice second full-length show despite all our colds. Thanks to the folks that did come out and said kind things. I broke my A string on the second last song ("We're Not Friends") and decided not to play guitar for the finale (a cover of "Search and Destroy" by The Stooges) instead of re-stringing for one song. Then while I sang without playing my hands got bored and I pulled on the broken A string and I guess cut my finger open and I saw a pretty decent amount of blood coming out of my hand.

Anyway, it was probably the most rock and roll thing in the history of me and it all ended when I was given a band-aid after the show. I'm sure Iggy Pop would have done the same.

Brad Sucks is opening for Just this Saturday night at Greenfields Pub. I think we go on at 9pm. We've practiced a lot but we may all have colds. Rocking will be attempted nonetheless.

Synthesizer Medley 1985 - Video of Thomas Dolby, Herbie Hancock, Howard Jones, and Stevie Wonder in a Synthesizer Medley at the 1985 Grammys. What the- [via]

Zach wrote in to tell me that he heard a version of my song Dirtbag in a Fark.com trailer mashup contest. The entry is by Mike Hindes and called Toy Story 2 Requiem. It's a hilarious mash-up trailer of the movies Toy Story 2 and Requiem for a Dream.

(15mb WMV) (Warning: there's some R-rated language.) Very awesome. It almost makes me glad I sat through 90% of Requiem for a Dream so I could find this extra funny. Almost. I'll never forgive that movie.

I also like how absurd the level of mashup-ness is getting on my music. "Hey, an Israeli remix of your song was used in a movie trailer mashup!" Say what now?

TheHipCola and I did an ABBA cover. Grab it here. (6mb mp3) This is for the ABBA Sidefight going on over at Songfight where everyone was called upon to cover ABBA songs. I've been real into ABBA lately so I wanted to do something for it. I think ours turned out well. Hard to live up to the awesome original though.